Description

This book offers a multifaceted examination of Africa’s development into the post-2015 global agenda from a geographical perspective. As a diversified and highly applied discipline, geography has a lot to offer to global debates, nuanced analysis of problems on and the search for innovative solutions to advance the African development agenda beyond 2015. The end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) era and the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in September 2015 mark an important turning point for Africa and an opportune time to examine new challenges and opportunities that it faces. The regional disparities in MDG progress affirm an important geographic tenet that the unique yet internally differentiated socio-cultural, economic, political, ecological, biophysical and historical context give Africa distinctive challenges and opportunities that demand particular approaches to development. This edited book presents innovative contributions examining Africa’s development performance in diverse sectors during the MDG era as a basis for understanding prospects for its development in the SDG era and beyond. It offers new and innovative study perspectives and methodological approaches on urban transformation, development financing, food security, climate change, gender equality, health, and regional integration, among other topics, and useful insights for scholars, students and development practitioners. This book was originally published as a special issue of African Geographical Review, the journal of the American Association of Geographers’ Africa Specialty Group, to mark the transition from MDGs to SDGs.

Table of Contents

Introduction – From the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Africa in the post-2015 development Agenda. A geographical perspective

Cristina D’Alessandro and Leo C. Zulu

1. Advancing African agency in the new 2030 transformative development agenda

Hany Besada, Jiajun Xu, Annalise Mathers and Richard Carey

2. From global goals to regional strategies: towards an African approach to SDGs

Giovanni Valensisi and Stephen Karingi

3. Can using geographical factors leverage private equity to deliver sustainable development results?

Frannie A. Léautier

4. Reproducing spaces of embeddedness through Islamic NGOs in Sub-Saharan Africa: reflections on the post-2015 development agenda

M. Evren Tok and Ben O’Bright

5. Engaging with and measuring informality in the proposed Urban Sustainable Development Goal

Helen Arfvidsson, David Simon, Michael Oloko and Nishendra Moodley

6. MDGs to SDGs – new goals, same gaps: the continued absence of urban food security in the post-2015 global development agenda

Jane Battersby

7. The SDG13 to combat climate change: an opportunity for Africa to become a trailblazer?

Agathe Maupin

8. Gender equality as a means to women empowerment? Consensus, challenges and prospects for post-2015 development agenda in Africa

Francis Onditi and Josephine Odera

9. Defining and measuring water access: lessons from Tanzania for moving forward in the post-Millennium Development Goal era

Sarah L. Smiley

10. Ecological sanitation: a sustainable goal with local choices. A case study from Taita Hills, Kenya

Matias Andersson and Paola Minoia

11. The Millennium Development Goals and Chinese involvement in French-speaking West Africa: which contributions for which issues?

Xavier Aurégan

12. Understanding the spatial context of sustainable urban health in Africa for the SDGs: Some lessons from the corridors of deprivation in Ilorin, Nigeria

Usman A. Raheem

13. The marginalization of walking, the Achilles’ heel of sustainable mobility policies in Oran (Algeria)

Asmaa Kerrouche and Mohamed Madani

About the Editors

Leo Charles Zulu is an Associate Professor in the Department Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University. He was also the Editor of the African Geographical Review journal produced by the Africa Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers. An interdisciplinary scholar, he has considerable professional and research experience on diverse issues including natural resources management, community resource management, forestry/conservation, solid biomass energy, climate change adaptation, health geography including HIV/AIDS, and international development, primarily in Africa. He also has more than 20 years of professional experience on environment and development work in Malawi and southern Africa.

Cristina D'Alessandro is a Senior Fellow at the Centre on Governance of the University of Ottawa, Canada and an Associated Researcher at the UMR PRODIG, Paris, France. Previously she served as a Knowledge Expert at the African Capacity Building Foundation in Harare, Zimbabwe and as a professor at Sciences-Po Paris and at the University Lumière Lyon 2. As an international scholar with experience in Africa, Europe and America, she holds a number of board positions and serves as an advisor for international organizations/institutions.